Professor Adalsteinsson is a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) at MIT. Professor Adalsteinsson conducts research on medical imaging with magnetic resonance, focusing on optimal methods for acquisition, reconstruction and processing of in vivo imaging data. His interests include techniques for efficient sampling and spatial encoding of spectroscopic magnetic resonance data, whereby small signals, originating, for example, specifically from neurons in the brain, yield information not observed with conventional structural imaging. Applications of these and related methods include a study of the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and characterization of Multiple Sclerosis.

Elfar was previously a member of the Richard M. Lucas Center for Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy and Imaging at Stanford University. He received his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude in Electrical Engineering from the University of Iceland in 1989, and his MSc and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1991 and 1995. He was a Fulbright Scholar at Stanford as well as recipient of an award from the American-Scandinavian Foundation.

Joseph V. Bonventre

Dr. Bonventre is Chief of the Renal Unit and Director of the Bioengineering Division at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and has had a long-standing interest in various aspects of cellular injury and repair mechanisms in the kidney with a special emphasis on the role of inflammation, biomarkers and stem cells. He has established the origin of the epithelial cells that repair the kidney after injury as dedifferentiated surviving proximal tubule cells. He was the first to describe the role of proximal tubule cell cycle arrest in the maladaptive fibrosis that can occur after severe injury leading to chronic kidney disease. He discovered and characterized Kidney Injury Molecule-1 (KIM-1) as the most highly upregulated protein in the proximal tubule after injury to the kidney of various types. Kim-1 expression converts the proximal tubule cell to a phagocyte. Kim-1 is also a very sensitive and specific biomarker of proximal tubular injury in a variety of species including man and has been qualified by the FDA and European Medicines Agency as a sensitive and specific marker for kidney injury in preclinical studies of nephrotoxicity. He has created iPS cells from patients with adult onset polycystic kidney disease and are working on ways to differentiate cells down the kidney lineage.

Lydia Bourouiba

Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Professor
Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering
Affiliate Faculty of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science

Dr Bourouiba is a physical applied mathematician focusing on problems at the interface of fluid dynamics and disease transmission with the aim of elucidating the fundamental physical mechanisms shaping the epidemiology and disease transmission dynamics in human, animal and plant populations.

With a doctoral research focused on the theoretical and numerical study of rotating homogeneous turbulence and a subsequent postdoctoral research focused on the mathematical modeling of infectious diseases and epidemiology, the focus of the Bourouiba Group is to elucidate the poorly understood mechanisms of disease transmission through the lens of fluid dynamics.

Alan Braly

Alan has been involved in medical devices his entire career, focusing on devices at the intersection of physician care and patient unmet need. At present, Alan is co-founder and COO of Silverstone Biosciences, a medical device company in stealth mode focused on back pain. In that role, he is responsible for day-to-day operations and executing the product vision. He also advises numerous early-stage start-ups across the spectrum of medical and life sciences technology.

Before Silverstone, Alan was co-founder and CEO of Obsidio Medical, a research-stage medical device company focused on commercializing a novel interventional biomaterial platform developed at MIT, Harvard Medical School, and Brigham & Women’s Hospital. In parallel, he was also a Harvard Business School Blavatnik Fellow in Life Sciences Entrepreneurship, Harvard’s healthcare-focused entrepreneur-in-residence program.

Prior to the Fellowship, Alan was a Director in the Medtech Practice at Health Advances, a boutique healthcare consulting firm. At Health Advances, he led engagements across almost every major therapeutic area and device category, helping clients from start-ups to leading public medical device companies on a range of commercialization challenges.

Before to graduate school, Alan started his medical device career working in R&D as a biomedical engineer in Medtronic’s cardiac rhythm management business unit. There his experience included new biomaterials development, preclinical and clinical research, and new technology portfolio strategy. His time at Medtronic also included a rotation as a Visiting Scientist at Mayo Clinic in their electrophysiology group.

Alan holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an SM in Health Sciences and Technology from MIT through the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and a BS in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University.

Using fMRI, EEG, neurophysiologic recordings, microdialysis methods, and mathematical modeling, Dr. Brown’s laboratory collaborates with investigators from MGH, Harvard, MIT, and Boston University to use a systems neuroscience approach in studying how the state of general anesthesia is induced and maintained. The long-term goal of this research is to establish a neurophysiological definition of anesthesia; safer, site-specific anesthetic drugs; and to develop better neurophysiologically-based methods for measuring depth of anesthesia.

Recent technological and experimental advances in the capabilities to record signals from neural systems have led to an unprecedented increase in the types and volume of data collected in neuroscience experiments and hence, in the need for appropriate techniques to analyze them. Therefore, using combinations of likelihood, Bayesian, state space, time-series and point process approaches, a primary focus of the research in Dr. Brown’s laboratory is the development of statistical methods and signal-processing algorithms for neuroscience data analysis.

Dr. Brown practices anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and holds a joint appointment as Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience at MIT. He co-directs the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program. When not studying neural signals of others under the influence of anesthesia, Emery enjoys challenging his own brain by speaking several Romance languages.

Deborah Burstein

Dr. Burstein received her bachelor’s degree in physics from Queens College of the City University of New York, and her Ph.D. in medical physics from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. She has been at the forefront of developments for new methodologies in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), including the pioneering research on the utilization of sodium MRI for evaluation of electrophysiologic conditions, innovative methods for imaging of the coronary arteries and perfusion imaging of the myocardium, and most recently, molecular imaging of cartilage. To that end, she and her colleagues have developed an MRI method to provide an index of glycosaminoglycan (GAG) concentration in cartilage. GAG is one of the main constituents of cartilage lost in early arthritic disease, and thought to be important to replace as part of therapeutic interventions. This imaging technique has been utilized to move the working paradigms away from the perceptions that osteoarthritis represents irreversible cartilage degeneration that could only be seen by loss of cartilage thickness on radiographs. The methodology was implemented in a number of clinical trials and clinical practice, enabling MRI to predict progression of disease, as well as impacts of physiologic conditions and surgical interventions such as obesity, exercise or osteotomy. Dr. Burstein and collaborators were awarded the Elizabeth Winston Lanier Award for development of this field of study.

Antje Danielson

Antje Danielson joined MITEI after eight years at Tufts University, where she directed the Tufts Institute of the Environment and was an assistant professor in the Department of Public Health. Her areas of interest are energy education and carbon capture and storage. She is also interested in research on conditions that underpin interdisciplinary research and collaborations.

Her previous roles include deputy director for sustainability at the Centre for Research into Earth Energy Systems at Durham University in the UK, where she initiated a carbon capture and storage working group. Danielson is a member of the Board of Directors of the National Council for Science and the Environment and has also served as President of the Council for Environmental Deans and Directors. She received teaching awards from Harvard University and an Exceptional Contribution Award from Durham University. In 1999/2000 she co-founded the car-sharing company Zipcar.

Antje holds a PhD in geochemistry from the Freie Universität in Berlin, Germany.

Joseph DeAngelis

Joseph P. DeAngelis, MD, MBA, is an orthopedic surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) who completed a fellowship in Sports Medicine and Shoulder Surgery. He specializes in sports-related injuries and disorders of the knee and shoulder. His clinical expertise includes knee reconstruction, shoulder restoration procedures and shoulder replacement. Dr. DeAngelis evaluates and treats sports-related problems as well as degenerative shoulder conditions.

Dr. DeAngelis graduated Optimus from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut with Honors in General Scholarship and Chemistry. He matriculated at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts. Upon graduation, he was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha, the national medical honor society.

Dr. DeAngelis completed his residency in Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Connecticut. As a Chief Resident, he was the recipient of the Cavazos Award and the Spencer Butterfield Memorial Prize for Excellence in Orthopaedic Trauma.

Upon completion of his residency, Dr. DeAngelis completed the Fellowship is Sports Medicine and Shoulder Surgery at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Under the guidance of Drs. Kurt P. Spindler, John (Jed) E. Kuhn and Warren R. Dunn, Dr. DeAngelis developed his expertise in the treatment of Sports-Related Injuries and Shoulder Surgery.

Dr. DeAngelis’s research interests include treatment of shoulder and knee conditions, Patient-Reported Outcomes and Evidence Based Medicine in Sports Medicine, as well as tendon to bone healing.

Professor Edelman holds faculty appointments at MIT where he directs the Biomedical Engineering Center and Harvard Medical School where he serves as Senior Attending Physician in the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Cardiac Intensive Care Unit.

His research combines his scientific and medical training using controlled drug delivery, growth factor biochemistry, tissue engineering, biomaterials-tissue interactions, and continuum mechanics to examine the mechanisms of tissue repair. His laboratory helped develop and optimize bare metal and drug-eluting stents, and advance endothelial cell and vascular biology, computational modeling of vessel formation, and the homology between endothelial paracrine and angiocrine regulation in cancer and vascular diseases.

As Chief Scientific Advisor of Science: Translational Medicine, he has set the tone for the national debate on translational research and innovation.

Conor Evans

Assistant Professor, Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital

Prof. Conor Evans received his B.S. in Chemical Physics from Brown University in 2002 studying ultrafast chemical dynamics in the Chemistry Department under the mentorship of Peter Weber. Aiming to focus on microscopy and technology development, Prof. Evans then attended Harvard University and received his Ph.D. in Chemistry under the direction of Sunney X. Xie in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology. In Xie’s lab, he worked to develop coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) microscopy as a biomedical imaging tool, and successfully demonstrated the first video-rate in vivo CARS imaging system.

After his graduation, he became a research fellow studying under Johannes de Boer and Tayyaba Hasan at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine. It was here that he developed his interest in imaging cancer therapeutics, building a time-lapse optical coherence tomography system to study tumor treatment response. Selected to join the Wellman and Harvard Medical School faculty in 2010, Prof. Evans’s lab is now growing rapidly in pursuit of new therapeutic options for patients with advanced forms of cancer. Prof. Evans recently received the NIH Director’s New Innovator Award and is a co-recipient of the Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Bridge Project Award.

William J. Febbo

Connecting the Pharma & Healthcare industry with compliant innovation has been Febbo’s trademark in over 18 years of leading health service & technology companies. In 1999, he co-founded MedPanel, a market intelligence and communication provider to the biomedical & medical device industries. When Febbo sold it in 2007 to Merriman Capital, he held dual roles as COO of the bank and CEO of Digital Capital Network which he launched pioneering digital compliance & transparency in the financial industry.

Febbo is also founder of Plexuus, an early stage payment processing platform for medical professionals with Sunshine Act-related activities. Currently, he holds the position of CEO at OptimizeRX and continues to discover, innovate and connect both products and people to meaningful experiences to improve health outcomes. Febbo holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Studies from Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania and serves on the board of The United Nations of Greater Boston, a non-profit focused on building global citizens within inner-city schools in Massachusetts.

Peter Feinstein

Peter Feinstein has been actively involved in the biotechnology and med-tech industries since 1981. He is currently a Managing Director and co-founder of Bioventures Investors, a med-tech focused venture fund founded in 1998. Previously, he served as Chairman and CEO of Feinstein Kean Healthcare (FKH), a communications and strategic consulting firm which he founded in 1987. Under his leadership, FKH grew from a start-up to the dominant communications and investor relations firm in the biotechnology/medtech sector. The firm was acquired by WPP plc in 1999.

Peter entered the biotechnology industry in December 1981 as a consultant to Biogen. In 1983, following the Biogen IPO, he was hired by Dr. Walter Gilbert to serve as Vice-President, Corporate Communications, where his responsibilities included global investor relations for this leading international biotechnology company during the formative years of the biotechnology industry.

Peter was a co-founder of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council, serving as Executive Director and was a Director for 12 years. He has also served on the Executive Committee of the Board of Associates of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, where he co-chaired the Whitehead Circle, and on the Executive Board of the Health Science and Technology Division of Harvard and MIT. As a BVI partner, he has served on the boards of Hospital Care Online (Chm), Sciona (interim CEO), Rcadia Medical Imaging (Chm), Rachiotek (Chm), Cylene Pharmaceuticals, HydroCision, sGC Pharma, BioValve, ActivBiotics, Pintex, CombinatoRx (obs) and Therion (obs). Peter received his B.A. from New York University.

Albert Galaburda

Dr. Galaburda has directed Cognitive Neurology at BIDMC since 1993. A native of Chile, he received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Boston University, and trained in Medicine under Norman Levinsky and in Neurology under Norman Geschwind, both at the Boston City Hospital (currently the Boston Medical Center). He received board certification in Internal Medicine in 1976 and in Neurology in 1977. Dr. Galaburda is the Emily Fisher-Landau Professor of Neurology (Neuroscience) at Harvard Medical School. His clinical and research expertise is in the field of cognitive neurology, with a special focus on learning and attention disorders, as they affect adults. He has had uninterrupted funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1981. He has published over 180 scientific articles and several books on these subjects, and has received many prizes and honors for his contributions to medical knowledge.

Roozbeh Ghaffari

Dr. Roozbeh Ghaffari is co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at MC10 Inc. In this role at MC10, Roozbeh has shaped the technology vision and is responsible for defining and developing emerging products. These efforts have led to the development and launch of the BioStamp® and “tattoo-like” bio-electronics as the foundation of MC10’s epidermal electronics platform. Prior to MC10 Inc., Roozbeh co-authored the business plan and helped launch Diagnostics For All, a non-profit organization developing low-cost health diagnostics based on a patented microfluidics technology. Roozbeh is a founding editor of the MIT Entrepreneurship Review and is a Research Scientist in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics. Roozbeh’s contributions in soft bioelectronics, micro/nano-scale systems, and auditory neuroscience research have been recognized with the Helen Carr Peake PhD Research Prize, the MIT100K Grand Prize, the Harvard Business School Social Enterprise Grand Prize, and MIT Technology Review Magazine’s Top 35 Innovators Under 35. Roozbeh has published over 40 academic papers (including Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Materials, Nature Communications, and PNAS) and is inventor on over 60 patent applications and awards. Roozbeh holds B.S. and M.Eng degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

Polina Golland

Professor Golland’s primary research interest is in developing novel techniques for biomedical image analysis and understanding. She particularly enjoys working on algorithms that either explore the geometry of the world and the imaging process in a new way or improve image-based inference through statistical modeling of the image data. She is interested in shape modeling and representation, predictive modeling and visualization of statistical models. Her current research focuses on developing statistical analysis methods for characterization of biological processes based on image information. In this domain, she interested in modeling biological shape and function, how they relate to each other and vary across individuals.

Professor Golland received her BSc and Masters in Computer Science from Technion, Israel in 1993 and 1995, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2001. She joined the faculty in 2003.

Martha Gray

Professor Gray’s educational and career path has been varied. Having gone to college thinking of becoming an elementary school teacher or math teacher, she received a degree from Michigan State University in computer science and systems science. She then received a master’s in Electrical Engineering from MIT and a Ph.D. in Medical Engineering/Medical Physics from HST. After a post-doc at Tufts Schools of Medicine and SUNY Stony Brook, she returned to MIT, joining the faculty of HST and MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She has also been a part of the Madrid-MIT M+Visión Consortium since it was founded in 2010 by Comunidad de Madrid, through Fundación para el Conocimiento madri+d, in partnership with MIT. It is a partnership of leaders in science, medicine, engineering, business, and the public sector dedicated to catalyzing change in Madrid’s healthcare innovation ecosystem by accelerating translational research and encouraging entrepreneurship.

Martha’s research interests center on ways to diagnose and treat cartilage degeneration (arthritis). Most recently, she and her research group have pioneered a nondestructive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) method for assessing cartilage. For the first time, investigators have the opportunity to evaluate therapies based on what is happening to cartilage—rather than pain—and to do so without a surgical biopsy. Her other research interests include connective tissue physiology, imaging, and microfabrication.

Ali Guermazi

Director of the Quantitative Imaging Center, Professor of Radiology, and Section Chief of Musculoskeletal Imaging at Boston University School of Medicine

Dr. Guermazi is a French board-certified radiologist. Prior to joining Boston University, he was Director of the Osteoporosis and Arthritis Research Group (OARG) at University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) and then Director of Clinical Research at Synarc, Inc. in San Francisco. Dr. Guermazi interest is musculoskeletal diseases, in particular note are his scientific contributions in the diagnosis and disease progression assessment of osteoarthritis using MRI. His work has focused on identifying structural risk factors for developing and worsening osteoarthritis. Dr. Guermazi had been involved in developing several original and widely accepted radiological methods to assess osteoarthritis disease risk and progression, including the WORMS and BLOKS for the knee, and fixed-flexion radiography for measuring joint space width.

Dr. Guermazi has been involved as an MRI reader for the past 9 years in several large U.S. studies including the Health Aging and Body Composition (Health ABC) study, the Boston Osteoarthritis Knee study (BOKS), the Multi-center Osteoarthritis STudy (MOST), the Framingham study, Osteoarthritis Initiative (OAI), and other large NIH-funded studies, as well as several Pharmaceutical-sponsored clinical trials. He is author of over 260 peer-reviewed publications and Investigator on numerous research grants related to MRI reading for Osteoarthritis.

Peter Hansen

Dr. Hansen’s scientific career has been centered on using mathematical physics within complex biological problems to produce practical results. Fifty years ago, his Harvard undergraduate advisor and later Nobel Laureate in physics, Roy Glauber, suggested that his interdisciplinary interests might be best applied to solving problems in the life sciences. He took that advice and found a fledgling program at Northeastern University in Boston where he could take graduate degrees in Electrical Engineering while solving life science problems. For his Masters Degree in the mid-1960’s Peter developed experimental animal models and mathematical models for laser retinal surgery that combined comparative anatomy, engineering heat transfer and protein denaturation kinetics. His Doctoral dissertation in the late 1960’s introduced him to a lifelong respect for the art of collaboration. For that work he showed experimentally that connective tissue could generate coherent optical second harmonic generation (coherent two-photon) and constructed a mathematical model for the process. Without collaborations with George Benedek at MIT Materials Science, Samuel Fine at MGH Dermatology, and Theodore Maiman, at Korad Corporation the inventor of the laser who built a custom system for Peter’s work, none of this would have been possible.

Dr. Hansen’s career has been almost exclusively in forming businesses and personally conducting commercial science. He is mindful of having been mentored in the 1970s by Louis Kamentsky, who worked in a commercial environment at IBM and is recognized as having created the idea of multi-parameter flow cytometry. Since meeting Lou, Peter has worked to develop multi-parameter flow cytometry, from single cells to multicellular organisms such as c elegans. This commercial life has exposed him to a wonderful variety of experiences. He participated in the first use of antibody therapy in the late 1970’s at MGH by constructing a cellular analysis device that could monitor immunosuppression in transplant patients. Devices like this now count CD4 cells in HIV patients. He began working with plasmonic nanoparticles in the 1980’s and developed commercial products ranging from solution-phase immunoassays to a point-of–care application whereby HIV therapy could be monitored in resource challenged regions. He currently works on extending this technology to understanding the immune response to ovarian cancer. He is guided by defining un-met needs, forming a collaborative, cross-disciplinary, team for solutions and seeking commercial ways to bring the solution to the public, both in the industrialized and developing worlds.

Arthur Hiller

Strategic Consultant and Business Advisor to Start-Up Companies, Hiller Life Sciences Strategies, LLC

Arthur Hiller has more than 30 years of experience across a wide range of functional areas and segments of the life sciences industry. He served most recently as the Chief Business Officer at Geppetto Avatars, an early stage company offering a unique compilation of digital technologies to address today’s significant challenges in health care. Prior to his role at Geppetto, Arthur was CEO of two early-stage life sciences companies in the medical device and drug discovery areas, respectively. As CEO of Cambridge-based SciFluor Life Sciences, LLC, a private-equity backed company utilizing fluorine chemistry to improve characteristics of drug molecules, he negotiated an expanded license agreement with Harvard University, recruited an elite management and chemistry team, co-localized the group into new office and lab facilities, and worked with the team to file IP and begin preclinical development of 13 new compounds for use in treating CNS diseases, infectious disease, inflammation, and ophthalmic conditions. Earlier, at Heartscape Technologies, he successfully launched a novel 80-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) technology to identify heart attacks not visible to the 12- lead ECG, raised $22M in B-round funding, and built a high-performing, successful team. In early 2010, he sold Heartscape to the medical device division of a Fortune 1000 company. Arthur has also held executive positions in general management, marketing, sales, sales management, and business development at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Merck and Co, and two other large, multinational pharmaceutical companies. He also served as Senior Vice President, Business Development for Merck-Medco Managed Care, where he focused his efforts on the conceptualization and execution of numerous alliances with pharmaceutical manufacturers to support and expand Merck-Medco disease management programs. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a Master’s Degree in Business Policy from Columbia University, and serves in Advisory Board, fundraising, and business development capacities for a wide range of start-up and early stage companies in the Boston area.

Mary Hochman

Dr. Hochman received a B.A. in chemistry from Brown University, an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and an M.B.A. from Boston University. She has 19 years of clinical, research, and teaching experience. This includes clinical experience with multiple imaging and intervention modalities in musculoskeletal, body, and breast applications and development of novel imaging methods (breast MR imaging and biopsy, MR imaging of placental oxygenation, and pre-operative imaging assessment of breast reconstruction flaps using CT angiography). She has been co-author of a number of studies involving original research, and has been PI or site-PI for several grants. At the national level, she serves on the Radiological Society of North America’s Scientific Program Committee. She has been the recipient of multiple teaching awards. In addition, she sits on the Radiology Department’s Business Committee and Leadership Council at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She has been on the Selection Committee for the Madrid-MIT M+Vision Fellowship program since its inception, and has mentored several of the Fellows

Dr. Hooker’s research interests include basic reaction methodology development for short lived isotopes and the application of these new methods to the construction of novel PET imaging agents to probe CNS function.

He received his undergraduate education at North Carolina State University in Chemistry and Textile Chemistry before moving to the University of California, Berkeley where he completed his Ph.D. During his graduate studies, Dr. Hooker developed new technologies for the construction of biomedical imaging agents using nanometer-sized viruses. Following the completion of his doctoral work in 2007, Dr. Hooker moved to Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Long Island, NY as a Goldhaber Distinguished Fellow and a Ruth L. Kirschstein NIH Fellow. While at BNL, Dr. Hooker trained under the recent National Medal of Science winner, Joanna Fowler, and worked on the development of new chemical strategies for the synthesis of positron emission tomography imaging agents. For this work, Dr. Hooker was named “Inventor of the Year” in 2009 by Battelle.

In 2007, he was named Goldhaber Distinguished Fellow at Brookhaven National Laboratory and worked with National Medal of Science recipient, Dr. Joanna Fowler, to develop new imaging methods for neuroscience. In 2009, Dr. Hooker moved to Boston to begin is independent career at Harvard. That same year he was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers by President Obama. The citation from the President noted his strong scientific record and his unique commitment to science mentorship. He has since been recognized by several additional national awards. Prof. Hooker currently serves as an Associate Editor for ACS Chemical Neuroscience, is a core faculty member for the MIT M+Visión Consortium and the Harvard Chemical Biology PhD program.

Kevin King

Dr. King received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Bioengineering from MIT, and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He is an engineer, scientist, and physician conducting interdisciplinary and translationally-minded research combining conventional tools of cellular, molecular, and small animal biology with novel technologies such as microfabrication, microfluidics, molecular imaging, and high-content screening to study innate immunity and inflammation in the setting of acute and chronic organ injury. His doctoral research involved development of a high-throughput cell-based microfluidics platform, which lead to discovery of a fundamental cell communication pathway used to spread and amplify inflammation after injury or infection. The findings were translated to mouse models of sterile liver injury due to diet, drugs, and alcohol, and resulted in dramatic improvements in disease severity and survival. They lead to discovery of an efficacious small molecule and now serve as the scientific basis for Heprotech Inc., an NIH-SBIR and Novartis-supported early stage pharmaceutical company developing liver protective therapeutics.

Having trained clinically in cardiology, Dr. King is now focused on improving the care of patients suffering from myocardial infarction and heart failure in two ways: 1) by engineering next generation diagnostics to improve and personalize care, and 2) by developing novel therapeutics that leverage findings from fundamental investigations at the intersection of immunology, cell communication, myocardial injury, and heart failure pathogenesis.

Petra Krauledat

Petra Krauledat received her degrees in Germany at the Ruhr-University-Bochum and holds a Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Medical Microbiology. She is a 2006 Tech Awards Laureate for Technology Benefiting Humanity. She has pursued a 35-year career in the commercial life sciences with Behringwerke, AG, in Germany and Ortho Diagnostics Systems, a Johnson and Johnson company, in the Unites States, and four successful companies for which she was technical co-founder and CEO. Two of these companies were based on plasmonic nanoparticle technology. At Behringwerke she directed the R&D program that resulted in the first HIV test approved in Europe. At Ortho Diagnostics she headed a 3-way R&D collaboration consisting of Ortho Diagnostics Systems, Chiron, and Abbott Laboratories to develop and launch the first FDA approved Hepatitis C test. At Sienna Biotech, the first company she cofounded, she invented and led the development of a system for multiple simultaneous immunoassays based on gold nanoparticle technology. At Union Biometrica she led the development of the first flow cytometer for the analysis and live sorting of multicellular organisms. At PointCare Technologies she invented and led the development of the first assay for CD4 positive lymphocytes that can be used at the point of care in resource poor environments, another technology using plasmonic nanoparticles. She is currently a principal in PNPResearch Corporation and a faculty member of the MIT-Madrid M+Visión Consortium.

Zvi Laden

Dr. Ladin has over 20 years of management experience in the medical industry, government and academia, focusing on clinical applications, regulatory affairs and reimbursement strategies. His experience includes establishing reimbursement and regulatory strategies for therapeutic and diagnostic medical device companies, submission of regulatory applications, including 510(k) and PMAs for products in Class I-III and drug-device combination products. Dr. Ladin represented companies in negotiations with the FDA, European and Asian regulatory agencies, and served for five years as a scientific advisor to the Food and Drug Administration. Dr. Ladin, a recipient of the Whitaker Fellowship and International Research Awards, taught mechanical and biomedical engineering at MIT and Boston University. B.Sc., Aeronautical Engineering and M.Sc., Biomedical Engineering, both from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology; Ph.D., Medical Engineering, MIT-Harvard Medical School / Division of Health Science and Technology.

Doug Levinson

Doug Levinson is a serial life sciences entrepreneur with over 25 years’ experience in creating high-value companies through conception, formation, and management. In 2012, Doug established Lake Street Enterprise as a vehicle to found life sciences companies based on translational science and technology. Through Lake Street Enterprise, Doug founded Cytrellis Biosystems, a clinical stage medical device company developing minimally invasive instruments for aesthetic medical applications. He also served for 4 years as the company’s first CEO. Prior to Cytrellis, Doug was a Partner with Flagship Ventures where he founded and served as CEO of two medical technology portfolio companies: T2 Biosystems (Nasdaq: TTOO) and Seventh Sense Biosystems. Prior to Flagship, Doug was as a member of the founding team of TransForm Pharmaceuticals joining Professors Bob Langer and Michael Cima of MIT. TransForm was acquired by Johnson & Johnson for $230 million in 2005. Doug was a member of the founding team at Millennium Pharmaceuticals where he initiated the company’s Inflammation Program and served as its Program Director. Before joining Millennium, Doug was with Creative Biomolecules where he was responsible for the generation of synthetic single-chain antibody molecules. Doug holds a Ph.D. in Genetics from Harvard University and a B.S. cum laude in Molecular Biology from the University of Massachusetts. He currently serves on the University of Virginia Biomedical Engineering Department’s Coulter Translational Partnership Oversight Committee.

Umar Mahmood

Dr. Mahmood is Co-Director of the Division of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging in the Department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Mahmood has focused on translational molecular imaging over the past two decades across diverse diseases, including development of preclinical imaging methods for evaluation of molecular targets in cancer, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune disease. He has placed an emphasis on clinically translatable techniques across PET, optical-fluorescence, MR, and SPECT imaging to help address early response assessment and in situ lesion characterization.

Maulik D. Majmudar

Associate Director of the Healthcare Transformation Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital
Chief Medical Advisor and Founding Member of Quanttus
Cardiologist at Veterans Hospital, Boston VA Healthcare System
Instructor at Harvard Medical School

Dr. Majmudar is an active member of the healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship community, with a specific interest in technology-enabled healthcare innovation. He currently serves as a medical advisor to two venture-backed startups, and was recently invited to be a Faculty Mentor for the 2014 MIT-IIT-B HealthTech Workshop in Mumbai, India.Dr. Majmudar attended Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and then completed residency training in Internal Medicine at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, followed by a fellowship in Cardiology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He also holds a patent and has had several publications in high-impact journals, such as Nature, Circulation, and Circulation Research.

Ellen McCarthy

Assistant Dean for Development and Diversity, Harvard Medical School
Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
Associate Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Dr. McCarthy received her bachelor’s degree in cardiopulmonary science from Boston University and her MPH and PhD in epidemiology from Tulane University. She has expertise using large administrative databases and national surveys to address healthcare issues. Her primary area of research focuses on racial/ethnic disparities in cancer treatments and end-of-life care. She is also study the role of competing mortality risks among women with breast cancer. At the Harvard Chan School, she teaches two courses designed to bridge coursework in epidemiological methods and biostatistics by providing students with practical experience manipulating and analyzing publicly available databases and complex surveys. As Assistant Dean for Development and Diversity at HMS, she leads the development leads the development and implementation of strategic plans and programs with regard to mentoring and career development activities. Dr. McCarthy won the 2008 Young Mentor Award and 2012 Barger Award for Excellence in Mentoring from Harvard Medical.

Dr. Mitchell researches the mechanisms underlying acute and chronic rejection in solid organ allografts, with specific emphasis on heart transplants. His work runs the gamut from mouse transplant models to human clinical transplantation, and is focused on understanding the specific immunologic pathways that drive rejection and ultimately graft failure. His lab is particularly interested in the mechanisms that induce the process of “chronic rejection” whereby the vessels in transplanted hearts become progressively more occluded until the grafts get starved for blood and die. The research may have much broader applicability, since the inflammatory mediators that drive the occlusive process in transplanted hearts may also be involved in mediating the vascular wall thickening that characterizes more “typical” atherosclerosis. Dr. Mitchell’s laboratory uses several genetically engineered mice (so-called “knock-out” mice), which are either deficient in cell surface molecules that promote the cellular cross-talk necessary to promote rejection, or which lack particular “cytokine” mediators or their receptors.

Rick Modi

Mr. Rick Modi has been the Chief Business Officer at Catabasis Pharmaceuticals, Inc. since 2015. Mr. Modi has 15 years of experience in corporate, business and product commercialization strategy. He has valuable experience across multiple brands, including orphan drug positioning, commercialization and marketing.

Prior to joining Catabasis, Mr. Modi was senior vice president, global marketing at InterMune, an orphan drug company that was acquired by Roche in 2014. He played a pivotal role in the launch of InterMune’s flagship product, Esbriet. Rick also held roles of increasing responsibilities in corporate strategy, new product planning and sales and marketing at MedImmune (AstraZeneca) and Centocor (Johnson & Johnson). Rick holds an MBA from the Wharton School and a BS in pharmacy from the University of Iowa.

Asif Naseem

Dr. Naseem joined PDS as President and CEO in December 2014 and is responsible for establishing and executing the company strategy. He has extensive experience in all areas of enterprise IT, including software, systems and applications. He has held executive management roles at large public companies and small and medium privately held companies, including multiple startups. Prior to joining PDS, he served as Vice President, Communications Global Business Unit for the Oracle Corporation, where he was responsible for growing the telecom infrastructure equipment and services business for network equipment and service providers. Before joining Oracle, Asif served as President and Chief Operating Officer of GoAhead Software, Inc., a telecom infrastructure software company that was acquired by Oracle. Previously, Asif led the operations at Iospan Wireless, a broadband wireless company that was acquired by Intel Corporation.

Asif’s experience also includes executive management roles at AT&T Bell Laboratories, AT&T-NCR and Motorola, where he established and ran successful software, systems and applications businesses. He lived in Europe for several years while working as a general manager in the Internet and Connectivity Solutions Division for Motorola, where he was responsible for establishing and running the software applications business for large telecom operators and enterprises in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). In addition to operational experience, Asif has successfully led several national and international mergers and acquisitions.

Asif holds an MSc in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. in computer engineering from Michigan State University. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School’s Program in Negotiation, and studied Leadership at the Center for Creative Leadership, a global provider of training and research on leadership and development. Asif is also an adjunct professor at Michigan State University, where he lectures on entrepreneurship and a wide variety of topics currently challenging the IT industry, and he is an M+Visión Visiting Fellow at MIT.

Lita Nelson

Lita Nelsen recently retired from her position as Director of the Technology Licensing Office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she had been since 1986. She now works as a consultant in technology transfer and entrepreneurship in the US, Europe, and Asia.

Lita earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering from M.I.T. and an M.S. in Management from M.I.T. as a Sloan Fellow. Prior to joining the M.I.T. TLO, she spent 20 years in industry, primarily in the fields of membrane separations, medical devices, and biotechnology.

Lita has served on many boards including the Association of University Technology as president. She was also on the board of Mass Ventures (MTDC) for 20 years, and is currently on the scientific advisory boards of Partners’ Investment Fund and the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center and is a senior advisor to Omega Funds Limited. She was recently awarded Xconomy’s Lifetime Achievement Award in Biotechnology. In 2009 the UK Government awarded her the honor of “Member of the Order of the British Empire” (MBE) for her work with technology transfer institutions throughout the UK.

Lauren J O’Donnell

Dr. O’Donnell is an Assistant Professor in Radiology at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She received her PhD from the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program at MIT as part of the Medical Vision Group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Laboratory for Mathematics in Imaging group at BWH. Her research focuses developing methods for studying the white matter tracts, or brain connections, using diffusion imaging. Her work has focused on quantitative analysis and modeling of white matter tractography in groups of subjects, as well as modeling of the structure-function relationship in healthy subjects and tumor patients.

Timothy Padera

As part of the Edwin L. Steele Laboratory for Tumor Biology, the Padera Laboratory examines the pathophysiology of tumor associated lymphatic vessels and lymphatic metastasis. Lymphatic vessels are responsible for draining interstitial fluid from tissues and for transporting immune cells to lymph nodes to maintain the body’s immune surveillance. Lymphatic vessels also facilitate the dissemination of cancer cells from a primary tumor to regional lymph nodes. The mechanisms used by cancer cells to form lymph node metastasis are starting to be understood, with the hope of identifying treatment strategies to lower mortality due to disseminated cancer. In addition to studying lymphatic metastasis, the Padera Lab also studies the molecular control of lymphatic function which plays a role in regulating tissue-fluid balance as well as immune function. When lymphatic function is interrupted, the result is lymphedema and local immune compromise. By understanding the mechanism controlling lymphatic function, the Padera Lab hopes to develop therapies to relieve lymphedema and maintain competent immune surveillance.

Etta Pisano

Dr. Pisano received her undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Dartmouth College and her medical degree from Duke University. Her professional interests center around the development, application and testing of imaging technology for the early detection and diagnosis of breast cancer and other breast problems. She is a past President of the Association of University Radiologists, a Gold Medalist of the American Roentgen Ray Society and past President of the American Association for Women Radiologists, and has been named by Diagnostic Imaging magazine as one of the 20 most influential people in radiology. She served as the Principal Investigator of the largest clinical trial ever run by a radiologist, the Digital Mammographic Imaging Screening Trial (DMIST), which enrolled 49,528 women in a study comparing digital to film mammography, the results of which were published in 2005 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. Pisano was awarded one of the first Ladies’ Home Journal Health Breakthrough Awards and in 2008 she was elected as a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

Before coming to BIDMC Dr. Pisano served as the Kenan Professor of Radiology, Vice Dean for Academic Affairs, Director of the Biomedical Research Imaging Center, and Director of the North Carolina Translational and Clinical Studies Institute at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, and Dean of the College of Medicine, Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC).

Chandra Ramanathan

Chandra Ramanathan is Vice President and Head of East Coast Innovation Center at Bayer. He is responsible for establishing the East Coast Innovation Center, building an innovative product portfolio with key academic partners, driving external scientific leadership and engaging with members of the local innovation ecosystem. His previous roles at Bayer include the global lead for External Innovation – Life Sciences and the role of the Global Launch Team leader of Copanlisib and Head of Pipeline Marketing.

Before joining Bayer, Chandra worked at Wyeth (Pfizer) and Bristol-Myers Squibb in various roles including Global Brand Team Leader, Licensing/Business Development, Commercial Strategy, Drug Discovery and Applied Genomics.

Chandra has worked across the pharmaceutical discovery, product development and commercialization spectrum for more than 21 years. He holds an M.B.A from the Columbia Business School, Ph.D. in Genomics/Bioinformatics, M.S. in Medicinal Chemistry and B.S. in Pharmacy.

Raúl San José Estépar

Raúl is Assistant Professor of Radiology at Harvard Medical School and a Research Associate at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He received his PhD in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Valladolid, Spain.

Raúl is focused on the study of lung disease, specifically Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), and the development of image-based biomarker for the discovery of genetics determinants and novel clinical associations for disease diagnosis and prognosis. His research interests are focused on medical applications of image analysis. This includes local image structure estimation using tensors analysis, image segmentation, and image registration.

Raúl is co-Director of the Applied Chest Imaging Laboratory and part of the Laboratory of Mathematics in Imaging and the Surgical Planning Laboratory, all of them at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is also part of the imaging core of the COPDGene study, a NIH funded study for the discovery of genetic determinants for COPD susceptibility.

Angelene Simonello

Angelene brings to Flex Pharma experience drawn from healthcare consulting, business development and program management across public and private biotechnology companies. Before joining Flex Pharma, Ms. Simonello spent 8 years at Biogen where she held roles in Corporate Development, focusing on M&A and Immunology in-licensing activities and, most recently as Program Director for Eloctate where she led a program team from pre-clinical studies to global approvals. Her career in biotech began in business development and alliance management at ViaCell and prior to that, she was an Analyst in Arthur D. Little’s healthcare practice.

Ms. Simonello holds a B.S. degree in biochemistry from Mount Holyoke College, and received her M.S. from Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.

Erik Sobel

Dr. Sobel has been actively engaged in R&D in both academic and commercial sectors. Most recently Dr. Sobel has served as principal investigator on leading-edge computer vision projects for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Air Force Research Laboratories (AFRL), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Sobel has led numerous projects focused automated analysis of 3D and 2D imagery in military and medical contexts. Prior to starting his own venture, Technology Research Laboratory (TRL), he was a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Systems & Technology Research (STR). Preceding this role, he was a Senior Research Scientist at BAE Systems Advanced Information Technologies (Formerly ALPHATECH Inc.), where he developed algorithms for the exploitation of 3D data, robotic systems, and computer vision. Dr. Sobel received his PhD. in Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania, researching visual information processing and perception in animal and human visual systems, and received his M.S. from the University of Pennsylvania in Computer Science specializing in Computer Vision. Dr. Sobel received his BA from Harvard University in Biology.

Simona Socrate

Principal Research Scientist and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, MIT

Dr. Socrate is a Principal Research Scientist and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Prior to joining the ISN, Dr Socrate served on the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT (2001-2008) and on the faculty of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Tufts University (2000-2001).

Dr Socrate’s research interests focus on identifying and modeling the mechanisms governing the deformation response of materials, including polymers, gels, biological tissue and fabrics, relating their macroscopic behavior to their underlying structure. Her current research efforts include: experimental and computational studies of the response of brain tissue; development of in-vitro systems to investigate brain cell response to pressure (shock) waves; investigation of appropriate resuscitation strategies during the early management of patients with TBI; experimental investigation and modeling of the dynamic response of high-performance fabrics; biomechanics of pregnancy and preterm delivery. During her tenure at MIT, Dr. Socrate has mentored 7 S.M, 11 Ph.D students and 4 postdoctoral associates. She is the author of over 50 publications in peer-reviewed journals and over 100 publications in conference proceedings.

Nancy R. Steele

Nancy Steele has worked at Pfizer for over 30 years in a range of leadership roles, including Corporate Strategy, Business Development and Organization Development. Her contributions helped to expand the product portfolio, forging business development collaborations in adjacent areas including diagnostics and digital health technologies. Earlier in her career, Nancy was the founder of a health services company, Pfizer Health Solutions (PHS), a subsidiary delivering patient care management and clinical decision support to payers and providers in the management of chronic conditions, including diabetes, COPD, depression, asthma and hyper- tension.

Prior to Pfizer, Nancy’s experience included clinical research in a psychiatric hospital, marketing of biomedical devices, leadership development at IBM, and serving as a ward psychologist in a mental health facility.

Nancy holds a BA in Psychology from the New School for Social Research and a MA in Organizational Psychology from Columbia University.

Collin Stultz

Prof. Collin Stultz uses techniques drawn from computational chemistry, signal processing and biochemistry to study the molecular mechanisms underlying human disease pathogenesis. Through computer modeling, he has developed a paradigm-shifting framework for understanding how collagen is degraded, implicated in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and cancer. He uses Bayesian methods to characterize the conformations of intrinsically disordered proteins, known to play a central role in neurological disorders, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Among his honors are being a recipient of the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in Biomedical Sciences and the James Tolbert Shipley Prize. A practicing cardiologist, he leads the biomedical area of EECS, and co-developed 6.S02, Introduction to EECS II from a Medical Technology Perspective.

Barbara Taylor

Barbara Taylor specializes in healthcare strategy, marketing, and sales and has worked in companies ranging from large public conglomerates down to small venture backed firms.

Most recently she has held a variety of business development, strategy and marketing roles at Philips Healthcare which has included work in: imaging diagnostics, healthcare software development, new business model innovation, lifecycle and service strategy, and new solution / product introduction. While at Philips, Ms Taylor spent 5 years in the Netherlands developing and globally launching new customer-centric service solutions. Her expertise includes segmentation and positioning, pricing and end-end product strategy.

Post MBA, Ms Taylor was a strategy consultant for Mercer Management Consulting before moving to Boston and joining Sensitech, a venture-back firm, that provided supply chain solutions for the pharmaceutical industry.

Ms Taylor holds an MBA in marketing and strategy from the Kellogg Graduate School in Evanston, IL and a BS in biology from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. She lives outside of Boston with her family and quirky dog.

Zach Taylor

Zach Taylor is currently working as a corporate and product strategy consultant at biotech startup Syros Pharmaceuticals which focuses on developing new therapeutics in the area of gene regulation. Prior to this role, Zach worked at Philips Electronics as the Director of New Business Development for their Healthcare Research group based in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. During his tenure at Philips, Zach provided business development leadership for new technologies in the biopharmaceutical space and helped several new technologies get off the ground including a novel MRI-guided, ultrasound mediated drug delivery technology as well as a novel in vivo click chemistry technology that is now the basis of a new company, Tagworks Pharmaceuticals. Prior to Philips, Zach worked at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, a biotech now owned by Takeda, in the role of Director of Corporate Development where he chaired the inlicensing committee. Additionally, Zach served as a project leader in the R&D organization, leading several Phase 2 oncology candidates in their development. Prior to Millennium, Zach was at Parke-Davis pharmaceuticals (now owned by Pfizer) in their commercial organization and has also worked as a consultant. Zach has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University and a BS in Applied and Engineering Physics from Cornell University.

Dr. Tompkins directs the newly established center for research and innovation, the Institute for Bioengineering and Biotechnology, which is based in Surgery at MGH. The Institute is the most recent evolution of a clinical and research program in burn and trauma that began in the 1970s. The collaborative track record and expertise in the Institute has secured more than $200 million in federal, foundation, and industrial support for basic and clinical research programs.

Ron serves as the principal investigator of the first-in-the-nation P50 award (P50-GM21700 in 1974) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and its associated NIGMS T32 Burn Research Training Grant (T32-GM07035 in 1975) for postdoctoral training in burn and trauma research. Ron’s research as the principal investigator of the “Inflammation and the Host Response to Injury” program (U54-GM062119) – the largest award ever received by MGH and 10th largest of the extramural NIH grants – has developed the clinical infrastructure to study critically ill trauma populations, as well as the technological and bioinformatics skills to isolate leukocyte populations and probe the transcriptome as it responds to severe injury. The development of clinical treatment protocols by consensus of the trauma and burn centers participating in this “Glue Grant” program led to improvements in survival, reduction in morbidity for injured patients, and established benchmarks for care in the fields of burns and trauma.

Innovations developed within the Division have found many applications, including detection of trisomy within the first trimester of pregnancy to replace amniocentesis, capture of circulating tumor cells to diagnose and treat cancer, and suggest subsequent treatments; and count of CD4+ cells in the blood at points of care such as Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia to enable rationale treatment with antiviral drugs.

Mehmet Toner

Professor Toner is a Turkish biomedical engineer. A professor of surgery at the Harvard Medical School and professor of biomedical engineering at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, he first gained prominence for his theory of intra-cellular ice formation while finishing his PhD in Medical Engineering at HST. Since then, Professor Toner has made contributions to the specific fields of cryobiology and biopreservation and to the wider field of biomedical engineering in the form of inventions, books, and journal publications.

Professor Toner obtained his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering at the Istanbul Technical University in 1983, and his master’s degree and doctorate in Mechanical Engineering and Medical Engineering at MIT in 1989. Toner worked on his doctorate under Prof. Ernest Cravalho who was one of the first engineering scientists to work on cryobiology and is still a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. Dr. Toner’s early work focused on understanding cellular injuries during cryopreservation and finding optimum strategies for cell preservation. His later works include microfluidics, Bio-sensing and dry preservation of mammalian cells.

Prof. Toner currently serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Engineering in Medicine(CEM) located at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Shriners Hospital for Children, as well as the Director of the CEM-affiliated BioMEMS Resource Center. The labs have produced several researchers and continues to train post-doctoral fellows and graduate students from MIT and Harvard University.

Roger Tung

Roger Tung, PhD, is President and CEO of Concert Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a biotechnology company developing compounds to treat pulmonary diseases, including cystic fibrosis; autoimmune and inflammatory diseases; and central nervous systems (CNS) disorders. Roger was Concert’s scientific founder and led the company through its IPO in 2014.

Prior to Concert, Roger worked in venture-backed start-up and major pharmaceutical companies including Merck and Vertex Pharmaceuticals, in the latter case as a founding scientist and most recently as Vice President of Drug Discovery. Roger has overseen the discovery of five drugs approved in the US for the treatment of cystic fibrosis, hepatitis C, and HIV infection. He is co-inventor of two marketed HIV drugs and has been issued over 100 US patents. He has authored or co-authored over 100 scientific papers, book chapters, and abstracts.

Roger received a BA in Chemistry from Reed College in Portland, OR, and a PhD in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from UW-Madison. He serves as a biotech and venture capital scientific advisor, is a faculty mentor for MIT’s IMPACT program, and is a member of the UW-Madison School of Pharmacy’s Board of Visitors.

Jessica Dawn Tytell

Jessica Tytell, Ph.D. is the executive director of Boston University’s newly formed Biological Design Center, where she is building a strong, interdisciplinary facility that provides international leadership through pioneering research, new models for industry-academic partnerships, and innovative improvements to graduate training. Previously, she served as the RNA Market Development Manager at Firefly, an Abcam company, where she headed global sales and marketing for the Firefly assays. In addition, she led product development and market research efforts while spearheading collaborations with scientists around the world. Before Firefly, Tytell directed research operations and lead several interdisciplinary projects in the Laboratory for Computational Cell Biology in the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School, where she focused on cell migration.

Dr. Tytell earned her Ph.D. in Biology from MIT and completed her postdoctoral fellowship at Children’s Hospital Boston, investigating how cells interact with their physical environment. She founded the Boston Area Mitosis Meiosis group to foster collaboration and promote innovation between Boston-area researchers, and has worked with the Association for Women in Science for more than 10 years.

Ben Vakoc

Ben Vakoc received a PhD in applied physics from Stanford University in 2001 where he researched the application of optical sensing devices for sonar applications. After his dissertation research, Dr. Vakoc participated in a venture funded start-up company, Novera Optics, which developed optical devices for the telecommunications marker. In 2002, Dr. Vakoc joined the Wellman Center for Photomedicine to participate in the development and translation of optical instrumentation to the clinic and biology laboratory.

Their laboratory focuses on the development and translation of optical technologies into either patient care or biological studies. In the clinic, they are developing coherent optical imaging platforms that can be deployed endoscopically to diagnosis and guide the treatment of disease. In the biological laboratory, they are developing these imaging technologies into tools that provide new insight into disease processes and therapeutic responses. The Lab’s methodology combines a core focus on optical technologies with broad-based engineering and cross-disciplinary collaboration.

Lawrence Wald

Professor Wald is working on technique development for high field imaging of the Brain. Development of 7 Tesla scanner and coils for imaging human brain function, highly parallel phased array coil development for 3T and 7T, Parallel transmit methods for B1+ mitigation in the head at 7T, and highly accelerated echo volume imaging.

Thomas Wessel

Dr. Wessel is our Chief Medical Officer and a board certified neurologist with extensive drug development experience, including serving as the medical lead for three products approved in United States: RAZADYNE at Johnson & Johnson , LUNESTA at Sepracor, Inc. and AMPYRA at Acorda Therapeutics, Inc.

Prior to joining Flex Pharma, Dr. Wessel was an independent consultant to several biotechnology and large pharmaceutical companies, including Concert Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Alkermes plc, Sanofi SA and Novartis AG. Previously, Dr. Wessel was the Chief Medical Officer of Acorda Therapeutics, Inc. from November 2008 until September 2011. Between March 2002 and October 2008, Dr. Wessel was employed in various leadership positions at Sepracor, Inc., including Senior Vice President of Clinical Research. Before joining Sepracor, Dr. Wessel worked on several CNS projects at Janssen Pharmaceuticals in Europe and the U.S. Before working in the pharmaceutical industry, Dr. Wessel held several academic and research positions.

Dr. Wessel received his M.D. from the University of Munich School of Medicine and completed his Ph.D. in experimental neurobiology at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psychiatry in Martinsried, Germany. He completed his residency in neurology at New York Hospital and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (Cornell University Medical Center).

John (Jack) Wixted

J. Wixted, MD is an orthopaedic surgeon specializing in orthopaedic trauma surgery. He is a Member of the Faculty in Orthopaedic Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He commonly cares for: Orthopedic trauma Hip fractures Pelvic and acetabular fractures Nonunion of fractures Osteomyelitis Post traumatic reconstruction Hip reconstruction/osteotomy Arthritis Education and Training Dr. Wixted earned his medical degree from University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, MA. He completed a surgical internship at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, WA and his orthopaedic surgery residency at the University of Massachusetts. After residency, he completed an orthopaedic trauma fellowship at the Massachusetts General Hospital. Professional Appointments and Affiliations Attending Orthopaedic Surgeon, Department of Orthopaedics Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School Board Certified, Orthopaedic Surgery Fellow, American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons Member, Orthopaedic Trauma Association Research Interests Fracture prevention and repair Biomechanics of musculoskeletal injury